Deceptive Design: Biography and Succession in Early Japanese Historiography

Compilers of Japan’s first official state history, the 720 Nihon shoki, faced an impossible task. The legitimacy of the imperial clan centered on an uninterrupted patriline beginning with the mythical first emperor, grandson of the sun goddess. Alas, the patriline actually commissioning this history had violently seized power in a 672 coup. Worse, the available models for historiography, Chinese works like the Records of the Grand Historian, posited a dynastic mandate that could be gained or lost depending on the virtues of the sovereign, an uneasy prospect for new rulers trying to appeal to an inviolable divine inheritance. Add to this genealogical irregularities and succession disputes in legends about quasi-mythical emperors, and what resulted was a bizarre narrative admixture: an unbroken line of sovereigns for 1200 years papering over clear breaks in the imperial patriline. This presentation argues that the narrative structure of Nihon shoki, especially the biographical data given about sovereigns at the beginning of each volume, regularized the narrative of succession, even when the actual details of a reign indicated discontinuity. Put shortly, form triumphed over content in assigning meaning to the past.

This claim will be demonstrated using the transition from the mythical ruler Buretsu (r. 489-506) to his successor Keitai (r. 507-531), noting parallel strategies in the recording of the 672 coup which necessitated the compilation of Nihon shoki in the first place. Because the text was written in Classical Chinese, scholarship has tended to overdetermine its reliance on Chinese models, and its adaptations of and departures from its continental forerunners have gone unnoticed.